Crack!

Raiders of the Lost Ark came out when I was about thirteen years old.  I have only vague ideas of why that bullwhip hooked into my consciousness at groin level.  Years later I had various friends in the S/M scene who owned signal whips by David Morgan, the same whipmaker responsible for Indianna Jones’ bullwhip.  Though it was well-known that Morgan wouldn’t sell to anyone who planned to use one of his whips on human targets, there were few enough alternatives that his whips were the ones to own.  I bothered some of my friends into letting me borrow theirs.  It took me way to long, but wearing a bike jacket and a borrowed helmet I finally learned to crack.

About fifteen years ago a somewhat shady vendor at one of the Boston Fetish Flea Fairs had what they said were David Morgan signal whips.  I was dubious, but the whips looked enough like the ones I’d handled that I paid the money.  For various reasons the whip got hung up in the closet and not handled too much until recently.

The big motivator was joining the social networking site FetLife.com.  Fetlife is an interesting site.  It’s still social networking, which means that way too many of the participants are proud of the fact that they can’t spell.  A substantial number of them (with or without spelling) post drooling follow-ups to anything posted by someone with a female name indicating that they can’t be bothered with the distinction between personals and discussion groups.  However, there is a fairly high-signal group for the discussion of single tails and their uses.  I joined up.  After reading for a bit, I got down my signal whip and posted a description along with the question:  is this or isn’t it a David Morgan?  The consensus of the group participants (especially after I posted some pictures) was that yes, it’s a Morgan.  Even better, it was made before he’d started farming out most of the work to apprentices, so there was a high chance that he’d actually made it.  Even better, I found out that there’s a monthly Boston-area single-tail meet at Victory Road Park.

The gatherings are usually on Saturdays, but the weather looked threatening for this past Saturday and the meet was bumped to Sunday.  I went there and met a gentleman who introduced himself as Master Domino, along with a few other people who made it over on a really nice summer afternoon.

Due to the lack of balance, fine motor coordination, and mirror neurons that go along with Asperger’s Syndrome, I have a really hard time learning how to do new things with my body.  Fortunately, it looks like I’d got all the hard work over with all those years ago when I bugged my friends into loaning me their whips.  I got the thing cracking pretty quickly.  I also learned that the reason it didn’t make loud cracks was that the popper is a bit too fluffly.  I have sinced trimmed it down. While signal whips traditionally have braided-in poppers, there are also sites on the interwebz that show you how to convert a signal whip to take replaceable poppers, and Master Domino’s helpful sub showed me how to make a new popper out of plain old DMC embroidery thread.  MD had an amazingly large collection of whips in his toy bag, including several nylon snake whips, leather bullwhips, and stock whips.  He let folks borrow some of his nylons.  I picked up a snake whip of about 4′ or so, but by then my arm was getting tired and I couldn’t do much with it.  I could tell that it felt awfully close to my signal whip.  In the while-I’m-dreaming-can-I-have-a-pony department, I wonder if my next whip purchase should be not a snake whip but a 5′ bullwhip, which will have a different feel and will allow volleys and the like.

I quickly wore out my right arm, not surprising as I have the muscle tone of caged veal.  I popped myself across the back and the upper arm several times, but as I live with chronic daily migraines a glancing blow with a signal whip isn’t enough to get my attention.  More serious is the amount of muscle soreness I picked up.  Even with a few doses of aspirin my right shoulder has been pretty sore today.  I’m just going to have to start taking the whip to the park two blocks away.  There are some oak trees with nice low-hanging limbs that will make good targets.  Being able to crack the whip is one thing, but being able to hit what you aim at is another, and possibly more important.

Question for you readers:  when you read the post title, what kind of crack did you think this post would be about?